22 réponses à ce sujet

[Benjmn]

It's occurred to me several times when playing through the Dragon Age games that civilization in Thedas faces numerous existential threats.  They've got people getting eaten by darkspawn, dragons and other fantastical monsters setting up shop in the most inconvenient places, demons killing folks using corpses or any given tragedy, and a segment of the population that can turn mass murderer without picking up a weapon if their dreams turn nasty.  This is all on top of the deaths resultant from the internecine warfare and disease present in any given medieval setting.  In every game death is everywhere you look, as are the abandoned ruins of past settlement.  Civilization doesn't seem to be advancing on the wilderness in Thedas, but retreating from it, and civilization doesn't seem to care.  According to this codex, the human, Andrastian societies care about making babies only where title is concerned.  In just about every modern society facing population decline, there are governmental and often religious efforts to encourage people to have more children.  You'd think the nobles at least would be concerned when their lands lie fallow due to lack of peasants, yet there are no apparent or mentioned human social mores encouraging women to procreate or have large families.

 

The lore does a decent job of explaining how the nonhuman societies deal with the mortality rates this exceptionally dangerous world imposes; dwarves with their concubines, Qunari with their eugenics and communal raising, elves with their stigmas, all of which satisfy my curiosity as to how their societies sustain themselves in the face of the numerous threats  For humans all I've seen is that most of the population doesn't care about procreation.

 

I've no doubt that I've completely overthought this aspect of the setting, but when I spend hundreds of hours playing in a setting my mind starts to wander. 

[(Disgusted noise.)]

With the exception of the end of the First Blight, when have they ever implied that population size is an issue among humans?

[X Equestris]

Andrastian marriage emphasizes producing children in general, not just amongst the nobility. Human societies in Thedas aren't in any danger of population decline.

[vertigomez]

Ahhh, I love discussions like these. Setting!! Lore!!1

But in this case, I'm pretty sure the answer is: plenty of peasants are banging. Humanity's not in any danger of dying off anytime soon... err, unless you count Architect crap?

[Ashagar]

Barring the population drop from demons raining from the sky and rampaging across the land(One of the War Table missions to hunt down groups of demons that wondered from the rifts and was rampaging across the lands) the blight, civil wars, the qunari invasion of Kirkwall then Anders and the aftermath I am sure the population did take a drop but given the shortness of each event I am sure barring the possible impending civil war in Navarra that would have armies of human and undead clashing the population will have plenty of time to recover quickly.

[Carmen_Willow]

Ahhh, I love discussions like these. Setting!! Lore!!1

But in this case, I'm pretty sure the answer is: plenty of peasants are banging. Humanity's not in any danger of dying off anytime soon... err, unless you count Architect crap?

There's the guy from South Reach, who boasted about his b**tards while his friend talked about eggplants. Yeah, I think the peasants are doing just fine. As I recall it from Origins, the dwarves are the ones who are in trouble. Their population is under considerable stress not only from darkspawn, but I believe there was something about declining fertility throughout the general population. Elves may be oppressed, but their numbers seem to be okay.

[legbamel]

City elves seem to be fine, at least in terms of population, but the Dalish are declining.  What a sad world would Thedas be with only humans and Alienage elves?

[Aimi]

The only population figures we have for Thedas are from WoT volume 1, which states that Ferelden has a population of 1 million in 9:30 Dragon and that Orlais has a population about four times that, and that's it.

Historically, ancient and medieval efforts to increase population growth by legislation tended to be failures; the state lacked the force to ensure compliance (even in the halcyon days of Rome), its laws were viewed as intrusive, and the benefits paled in comparison to the problems associated with having more children.

Conversely, the biggest brakes on population growth were food supply (usually inadequate), disease (closely associated with poor food supply), war, and poor medical quality leading to high rates of death in childbirth. Interestingly, these factors actually don't seem to apply to some segments of society in Thedas. BioWare's writers are awfully lax with the issue of food supply; it seems to be abundant for those with cash, and Thedas' economy is ridiculously highly monetized so cash is readily available. Mage healers are so vastly advanced compared to medieval medicine that there's no possible comparison: even if they're not available to the bulk of the population they're clearly available to some people, which undoubtedly helps. And war in Thedas is...well, it happens, but since the writers treat the dislocations and privations caused by war in a cavalier, twentieth-century manner (refugees from Ferelden going to the Marches? en masse?), I doubt that even that matters all that much. Certainly the Blights aren't a serious issue; from the Exalted Age to the Dragon Age, a solid four hundred years, there were no Blights at all, and the only one since was a small-scale affair in Ferelden. Actually, what I'm more interested in is the question of how life survived the Blights at all when Blight supposedly destroys everything it touches, including the soil.

But we shouldn't overthink any of this stuff. This is a fictional setting. It is created by people who are more interested in telling a story than in making sure that all of the bits and pieces work plausibly; they do make an effort, but they're not scholars, nor should they be expected to be. Applying military logic to the Battle of Ostagar makes it break; applying economic and demographic logic to the rest of the world would undoubtedly do the same. There is no reason to suspect population decline is a serious issue in Thedas simply because there's been no explicit mention of it as an issue for anybody but the dwarves of Orzammar. That's the thing about the devs controlling the setting like that: if they want to make it look like an issue for the next story they tell, regardless of what's been said in prior games, they'll make it an issue, and if you think there's going to be an issue based on reading between the lines in prior games, there's no guarantee that it will become one.

Take the men, elves, and dwarves of Middle-Earth, which at the end of the Third Age had a laughably small population compared to the inhabitants of Mordor. Sauron mustered armies to destroy Gondor that outnumbered the entire population of that country by a significant margin. And yet, because Tolkien did not understand warfare in an abstract or scholarly sense (or because he chose not to implement that understanding) and because he did not understand demographics, humanity won most of the battles in that war - along with the war itself - so decisively that Gondor gained a new hegemony over most of the continent. It's frankly preposterous for that to have happened. But it happened anyway, because he wanted it to, and that was that.

[Ashagar]

Yep laughable like a small army Greeks defeating and conducting the conquest of the vast Persian empire with its vastly larger armies and which which held well over 40 percent of the worlds population at the time as well as beyond into India.

 

Though keep in mind in Tolkien references that the population western folk of Tolkien's middle earth was still far bigger in the books than you see in the movies which is laughably small even if it was smaller than the enemy population.

[MoonDrummer]

The Dwarves are in trouble, Orzammar only has a population of 100,000 and I would imagine Kal Sharok has a smaller population than them. And apparently being so close to the Darkspawn is affecting their fertility.

[Carmen_Willow]

The Dwarves are in trouble, Orzammar only has a population of 100,000 and I would imagine Kal Sharok has a smaller population than them. And apparently being so close to the Darkspawn is affecting their fertility.

Exactly.

[Ashagar]

Kal Sharok might be the larger of the two as it was the original capital and given the dwarven record of supposable lost great cities there may be other great cities that survived in spite of Orzammar believing them lost because they abandoned them. Still the underground dwarves are still in trouble regardless of how many cities are surviving.

 

However I don't think the dwarves as a speices are trouble because there is apparently a large population of them in Tevinter where they are respected as well as a sizable population across southern Thadas. I wouldn't be surprised if there might be more surface dwarves than there are underground dwarves at this point and surface dwarves aren't having their fertility effected by living close to the darkspawn.

[MoonDrummer]

Kal Sharok might be the larger of the two as it was the original capital and given the dwarven record of supposable lost great cities there may be other great cities that survived in spite of Orzammar believing them lost because they abandoned them. Still the underground dwarves are still in trouble regardless of how many cities are surviving.

 

However I don't think the dwarves as a speices are trouble because there is apparently a large population of them in Tevinter where they are respected as well as a sizable population across southern Thadas. I wouldn't be surprised if there might be more surface dwarves than there are underground dwarves at this point and surface dwarves aren't having their fertility effected by living close to the darkspawn.

I'm not sure, Orzammar's population would have grown during the fall of their empire as that is where the people fled when their thaigs fell. 

 

I'm not sure how many surface dwarves there are, they could very well outnumber Orzammar and Kal Sharok combined for all I know.

[TheKomandorShepard]

Those damn mages can't go 10 years without creating world threatening disaster and that without other kind of disasters mage create.Then thedas like wars and roads are full of things that gladly will kill you. 

[DarkKnightHolmes]

Looking from the amount of characters in Open world areas, I'd say the population is really declining.

[Benjmn]

I know population decline hasn't been explicitly mentioned.  I'm just extrapolating from all the emptiness and death you see, plus the fact that there have been major killing events going on somewhere in human civilization in Thedas for at least the past 20 years.  The mage/templar war affected all of them to an extent, followed by the destruction resulting from demons raining from the sky and the associated war, Orlais had a civil war, Ferelden had a revolution followed by a blight, Antiva had a blight that according to wiki covered their whole nation, the free marches had a coup in starkhaven plus the dragon age 2 events in kirkwall, the Tevinter have been engaged in war with the qunari for a while, plus other events I'm sure to have forgotten or haven't read about.  To think that this isn't affecting population to a noticeable degree doesn't make much sense to me.

 

Beyond that I don't have a lot new to add.  Humans seem to have small families (I can't think of a character with more than 2 siblings), and nothing in society seems to encourage them to do otherwise.  Replacement birthrate in modern societies is roughly 2.1 children per woman, and it would have to be higher in Thedas.  You can write it off as "this is a fictional setting, stop overthinking it", but when they've gone to the trouble of writing explanations for the nonhuman civilizations it's going to niggle at me while I play.

[midnight tea]

Beyond that I don't have a lot new to add.  Humans seem to have small families (I can't think of a character with more than 2 siblings), and nothing in society seems to encourage them to do otherwise.  Replacement birthrate in modern societies is roughly 2.1 children per woman, and it would have to be higher in Thedas.  You can write it off as "this is a fictional setting, stop overthinking it", but when they've gone to the trouble of writing explanations for the nonhuman civilizations it's going to niggle at me while I play.

 

Well, Cullen has two sisters and a brother. Also, Thedas (or at least parts we play in) is much more egalitarian than Europe during Middle Ages - many women serve in military or even rule, while 99% of women IRL could do little else other than sitting in house and raising children.

 

Anyway, I simply assume that even though times are tough, the child mortality rate is simply much lower than what it was IRL during comparable time. The mortality rate was the main reason why women had so many children before 19th century (if I remember correctly statistical woman had 8 children) - most of them never managed to survive first few years, much less grow to be an adult.

Also, people live longer in Thedas; human lifespan it's likely closer to our modern times, rather than what it was a few centuries ago - and we live twice to four times as long as our ancestors. Heck, Cassandra or Leliana would be considered ANCIENT if they lived here in, say, 13-th century

 

 

And, well... let's not forget contraceptives. I kinda assume that silphium plant ain't yet extinct in Thedas xD

[Ashagar]

The thing to keep mind about statistics is that the average life expectancy for the ancient and medieval worlds are thrown off by wars, diseases, famines and child birth deaths as well the simple fact that many children didn't survive early childhood.

[Aimi]

Yep laughable like a small army Greeks defeating and conducting the conquest of the vast Persian empire with its vastly larger armies and which which held well over 40 percent of the worlds population at the time as well as beyond into India.
 
Though keep in mind in Tolkien references that the population western folk of Tolkien's middle earth was still far bigger in the books than you see in the movies which is laughably small even if it was smaller than the enemy population.

According to classical writers like Arrianos, Alexander faced an army of a million men at the Battle of Gaugamela, the climactic fight of his anabasis. Hans Delbrück showed over a hundred years ago that that number was physically impossible by multiple orders of magnitude. A more realistic, but still probably outsize, appraisal of the respective armies of the two sides at Gaugamela would be something like ~40,000 against ~75,000 - clearly, the Makedonian army was outnumbered significantly, but not nearly on the scale as the ancients claimed. And certainly nothing like being outnumbered ten to one, as the humans were in the siege of Minas Tirith and in Ithilien. Furthermore, the Iranian army probably sustained something like 20-25% casualties, which is the usual for a decisive defeat through most of history. Tolkien regularly had armies of orcs and uruks take upwards of 90% casualties, virtually all of which were dead rather than wounded or captured.

Gondor's new hegemony over the world at the dawn of the Fourth Age, including campaigns against the hostile easterlings, was also not directly comparable to Alexander's conquest in any meaningful way. When Alexander took over the Iranian empire, he left much of its bureaucratic machinery intact and was able to successfully co-opt many of its elites; after he died, the most intelligent of his epigones (Seleukos, Antigonos, Ptolemaios, etc.) continued and expanded the program. The Makedonian empire over Asia was not created and sustained ex nihilo; it incorporated what had existed before. Otherwise, it would not have been able to exist. But can you imagine Elessar making orc satraps, or recruiting armies almost entirely made up of easterlings and haradrim?

Tolkien clearly drew on myth and literature when making Middle-earth, not academic history. Almost all fantasy writers do. This doesn't make them bad settings at all. I'm not trying to say that Lord of the Rings and Dragon Age are bad because they're unrealistic, or anything. That would be silly. They are clearly unrealistic, but they're perfectly serviceable fiction. What I am saying is that because these settings are created without particular reference to reality, it's foolish to use reality to try to understand them, and it's even more foolish to use reality to try to predict where they'll go next.

[Ashagar]

Modern historians seem to vary between 52,000 and 100,000 thousand with most estimates I've seen leaning towards the higher spectrum for the Persian army while putting the Greek army around 47,000 mostly infantry as opposed to the more Calvary dominated force of the Persians. Admittedly not nearly to the scale of forces wielded by empires like the Roman, Chinese or Holy Roman Empires but sizable armies and well within the realms of possibility.

 

Though I do agree the death tolls around something like 90 percent death tolls does sound more like the aftermath of the Battle of Thymbra where the modern views put the death toll around 100,000 mostly on the Kingdom of Lydia's side than what normally happened even accounting for the complete collapse of the enemy forces.

[Eliastion]

(...) Also, Thedas (or at least parts we play in) is much more egalitarian than Europe during Middle Ages - many women serve in military or even rule, while 99% of women IRL could do little else other than sitting in house and raising children.

(...)

Well, this particular part doesn't really help as casualties in these wars affect birthrate even more (and dangerous/travel-intensive work for women don't encourage having more children either).

[Wulfram]

The as has been pretty peaceful for the last 150 years, it seems to me. One localised blight, a war between a small minority and a fairly small professional military force that failed to bring in major allies on either side, and another war that was largely waged in a sparsely populated region of Thedas doesn't really change that.

Now, Thedas after the first two blights and Andraste's war must have been pretty much post-apocalyptic, but that was a long time ago.

[Benjmn]

Well, Cullen has two sisters and a brother. Also, Thedas (or at least parts we play in) is much more egalitarian than Europe during Middle Ages - many women serve in military or even rule, while 99% of women IRL could do little else other than sitting in house and raising children.

 

Anyway, I simply assume that even though times are tough, the child mortality rate is simply much lower than what it was IRL during comparable time. The mortality rate was the main reason why women had so many children before 19th century (if I remember correctly statistical woman had 8 children) - most of them never managed to survive first few years, much less grow to be an adult.

Also, people live longer in Thedas; human lifespan it's likely closer to our modern times, rather than what it was a few centuries ago - and we live twice to four times as long as our ancestors. Heck, Cassandra or Leliana would be considered ANCIENT if they lived here in, say, 13-th century

 

 

And, well... let's not forget contraceptives. I kinda assume that silphium plant ain't yet extinct in Thedas xD

 

I'd forgotten Cullen's family size.  Still, 4 children isn't exactly a huge family.  

 

A more egalitarian society generally means a lower birthrate, which is part of why the lore's silence on the issue bugs me.  As for contraceptives, though they aren't mentioned anywhere, they have to exist or else a mixed gender army would be pretty much impossible.  The inquisition doesn't appear to have a maternity ward or a daycare, so I have to assume they have some effective magical or medical way to prevent (or end) pregnancies in the ranks.  I could also assume celibacy, but NOTHING about dragon age makes me think that's the case.  (Or I could assume the authors cared more about portraying an egalitarian medieval society than explaining how it works, but the amount of lore put into the game makes me think that's not the case.)  

 

An effective contraceptive would also go a long way towards explaining the gender roles in their society, but only makes the question of population decline more puzzling.  Modern egalitarian societies with wide access to effective contraceptive aren't the most fertile.  Quite a few of them actually do have population decline, despite no plagues or wars depleting their populations.

 

I haven't seen much to indicate a longer lifespan or lower infant mortality rate, though.  I suppose the effectiveness of alchemy could do that, but I don't know how widely available it is.  Magical healing is stated to be uncommon, and if the plague seen in DAO or the sad state of Anders's clinic are any indication of how society handles disease and injury among peasant populations, mages aren't exactly rushing in to help.  

 

The as has been pretty peaceful for the last 150 years, it seems to me. One localised blight, a war between a small minority and a fairly small professional military force that failed to bring in major allies on either side, and another war that was largely waged in a sparsely populated region of Thedas doesn't really change that.

Now, Thedas after the first two blights and Andraste's war must have been pretty much post-apocalyptic, but that was a long time ago.

  

Even if the Blessed Age was relatively peaceful, the Dragon Age has been one of bloody instability.  And even in the Blessed Age you'd still have demons and mages on top of the food concerns, disease, and deaths to war and occupation (Ferelden Rebellion) that could be found in the middle ages that inspired much of the setting.